The marigolds were wrong.
Meera Kapoor stood at the entrance of the Malhotra haveli and watched a decorator gesticulate at another decorator about the marigolds, and she thought — not for the first time, and certainly not for the last — that this family did everything at a volume most people reserved for emergencies.
"Too orange," the first decorator was saying. "The brief said warm gold. This is orange. This is a vegetable."
"Marigolds are marigolds," the second decorator said flatly.
"Not in this house they aren't."
Meera pressed her lips together to keep from smiling and stepped through the entrance of the haveli, ducking around a ladder that had no business being in the middle of the corridor, sidestepping a roll of fairy lights that someone had abandoned on the floor, and emerged into the main courtyard, where the chaos was, if anything, more organised.
The Malhotra haveli in normal times was already a lot — three storeys of old Delhi architecture, a courtyard with a neem tree that had been there longer than anyone could remember, corridors that led into more corridors, rooms that connected to other rooms in ways that had confused Meera for an entire year before she'd made peace with getting lost. But the haveli in wedding mode was something else entirely. It was like watching a very large, very beautiful machine running at full speed with several of its panels removed so you could see all the parts moving at once.
Meera loved it.
She'd been coming here for five years — ever since her first year of college when Anaya Malhotra had sat next to her in a literature lecture and borrowed a pen and never given it back and somehow, in the process, become the most important person in Meera's life. Five years of this haveli, these corridors, this family. Five years of feeling, every single time she walked through that entrance, like she was walking into something that had been waiting for her.
In ten days, she was going to marry into it.
The thought sat in her chest the way it always did when she let herself think it directly — warm and complicated and threaded through with something she didn't quite have a name for.
"Meera beti, you're here!"
Baba appeared from somewhere near the kitchen, and Meera's heart did the thing it always did around him — that immediate, involuntary settling, like taking a deep breath after being in a room with no air. Ram Malhotra was not a large man but he had a presence that made rooms feel smaller in the best possible way. He was silver-haired and sharp-eyed and he had a way of looking at you like he was reading something that most people didn't know you'd written.
"Baba." She let him fold her into a hug and hugged him back properly, the way she always did. "When did you get back from the caterers'?"
"An hour ago. I have solved the starter situation." He held her at arm's length and looked at her with that particular expression — fond, assessing, quietly proud of something. "You look tired."
"I am not tired, I'm just carrying a lot of wedding-related spreadsheets in my head simultaneously."
"Same thing." He patted her cheek. "Go find Anaya. She's been asking about you since morning." He was already turning back toward whatever required his attention next. Baba was never in one place very long during the run-up to a function. He was everywhere, all at once, in the particular way of men who understood that the best kind of authority was the kind that didn't need announcing.
Meera watched him go and then turned to survey the courtyard properly.
The neem tree had been strung with lights — hundreds of them, tiny white ones that would look extraordinary at night and were currently just looking like a lot of effort in the afternoon sun. Flowers were arriving in crates from somewhere and being distributed by a woman with a clipboard who had the look of someone who had not slept since Tuesday. Two young men were attempting to construct something that would presumably become a decorative arch and were failing in a way that was visually interesting if not structurally promising.
And in the middle of it all, moving through the chaos like he'd simply decided it didn't apply to him —
Veer.
Meera had had five years to prepare for the particular effect of Veer Malhotra walking into a room. She had not managed to prepare for it. She suspected this was one of those things you either got used to or you didn't, and she fell firmly into the second category.
He was talking to the woman with the clipboard now — actually talking, which was unusual, because Veer's default mode was a meaningful silence that somehow communicated more than most people's sentences. He said something to her in a low voice and she nodded rapidly three times and made a note. He said something else and two of the men near the arch suddenly had a new sense of purpose and went back to their work with significantly better results.
He did not look around the courtyard.
He did not, in particular, look toward the entrance where Meera was standing with her overnight bag over one shoulder and five years of complicated feelings sitting quietly in her chest.
She watched him cross the courtyard, redirect a conversation between two aunties, accept a cup of chai from a passing household staff member without breaking stride, and disappear into the corridor that led to the family offices.
Gone. As though she were furniture. As though she were a decorative arch.
Meera shifted the bag on her shoulder and exhaled slowly through her nose.
Five years, she thought, and he still walks past me like I'm part of the decor. Lovely. Truly. She was marrying this man in ten days.
"You're doing the face," said a voice behind her.
She turned. Anaya was leaning against the courtyard wall with a cup of chai of her own and the expression she wore when she'd been watching something for a while and had decided not to comment until the most opportune moment. She had her mother's sharp eyes and her father — her adopted father, Baba — and she was one of the most perceptive people Meera had ever known, which was occasionally an inconvenience.
"What face?"
"The Veer face. The one where your eyebrows do something complicated."
"My eyebrows are just eyebrows."
"Your eyebrows are a whole conversation." Anaya pushed off the wall and linked her arm through Meera's. "Come on. I'll show you your room. Ma has put you in the blue room on the second floor, which means she loves you most."
"She loves everyone most," Meera said, allowing herself to be led.
"She loves you specifically most right now because you helped coordinate the caterer situation and apparently that was very stressful." Anaya steered them around the fairy lights on the floor. "Also she cried about your engagement photos again this morning."
"She cries about everything."
"She does. It's wonderful." Anaya paused at the bottom of the staircase. "Did you eat? Before you came?"
"I had a paratha at the dhaba near the station—"
"That's not eating. Come to the kitchen first."
And Meera let herself be pulled toward food and noise and the particular warmth of this house, and tried very hard not to think about the way Veer had walked through the courtyard like he owned the air and had not, not once, looked in her direction.
She was used to it.
She was absolutely used to it.
The marigolds, she noticed on the way past, were definitely too orange.